When are There Too Many Women? Consumers’ Judgments of Gender in Service Groups

Consumer researchers have identified ways in which an employee’s gender influences consumers’ perceptions (e.g., consumers’ responses to a model or spokesperson in an ad, a salesperson, an organization’s leader) (e.g., Gilly 1988; Matta and Folkes 2005; Mohr and Henson 1996; Richins 1991), but no research has investigated consumers’ judgments when presented with a service organization’s gender composition. Considering that stereotypically male occupations generally have higher prestige and salaries and that women’s salaries within occupations generally lag men’s (Budig 2002), we believe that investigating male-typed occupations is an important starting point for research on how various gender compositions for a workgroup influence consumers’ perceptions of that group. For a male-typed occupation, does a workgroup’s gender composition influence consumers’ evaluations? If so, do negative perceptions increase proportionally with the presence of each additional woman or is it a step function? In this research we address these fundamental and previously unexplored questions. We conducted two laboratory experiments that systematically varied a workgroup’s gender composition and asked consumers about their impressions of the group. We find that a workgroup’s gender composition does indeed influence consumers’ judgments of the group and its output. In addition to addressing a novel issue with important managerial implications, our research sheds light on fundamental aspects of group impression formation. Our hypotheses propose different results from a linear or averaging model that predicts increasingly negative judgments as the proportion of women increases, even though an averaging combination rule is one that follows from well-established theory (Anderson 1981) and has been demonstrated in other consumer judgments (e.g., aggregation of information about product bundles, Yadav 1994).